The FreeBSD Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to supporting the FreeBSD Project. The Foundation gratefully accepts donations from individuals and businesses, using them to fund projects which further the development of the FreeBSD operating system.

Friday, December 12, 2014

Recently, The FreeBSD Foundation announced the addition of Cheryl R. Blain to the Board of Directors. We sat down with Cheryl to find out more about her background and what brought her to the Foundation. Take a look at what she has to say:Tell us a little about yourself, and how you got involved with FreeBSD?I was bit by the entrepreneur bug in 1999 when working for a non-profit. I’ve worked with high-tech, venture-backed, small-cap companies ever since. My typical engagement finds

Cheryl R. Blain

me streamlining operations and sales teams to prepare companies for their next step forward, which most often involves financing. I have a master’s degree in business administration with a dual emphasis in finance and sustainable enterprise, from Saint Mary’s College and as a visiting student at UNC Kenan-Flagler.Xinuos is the latest high-tech, venture-backed company to which I’ve plied my wares. While working for Xinuos, I was exposed to FreeBSD for the first time in 2013. During my first week on the job, I was asked if I was willing to go to Ottawa, Canada to learn more about FreeBSD and the community of developers. The head of engineering and I felt the conference was very important to Xinuos’ future, so we decided it was an opportunity not to be missed. Since the trip was so unexpected, I actually had to have my passport over-night shipped to me in our New Jersey office so I could leave the following day! My colleague and I attended BSDCan and it was everything we had hoped it would be. We were welcomed by the development community and pleasantly inundated with inquiries about our interest in FreeBSD. David Chisnall was an especially helpful evangelist of FreeBSD, and made sure my colleague and I had the information we needed.Why are you passionate about serving on the FreeBSD Foundation Board?The FreeBSD community (including the board) is in no small part the reason I chose to learn more about the project as a commercial offering two years ago. My passion is in building businesses, and I wanted to work on a project that was technologically sound, well supported and attractive to people who I like and respect. The FreeBSD community quickly forgave me for being the least technical person in the room, and was wonderful in embracing the value I can bring to the community from a business perspective.I look forward to doing my part to ensure that the FreeBSD project has a vibrant future.What excited you about our work?There are many things that make FreeBSD interesting...but the first time I think I got really excited was in Ottawa in 2013, when Matt Ahrens gave his talk on ZFS. Every developer in the room was abuzz with excitement. In Matt’s presentation he listed logos of the other open source operating systems using ZFS, but I connected with how the room full of BSD developers really embraced Matt as their own. His bold move to pack his box at Oracle to continue his open source work, helped me realize the people associated with FreeBSD are not status quo...they are pushing the envelope. Then I met Peter Grehan and Neel Natu and was introduced to their work on bhyve, and Justin and George as Foundation board members and FreeBSD committers and knew that even though the FreeBSD project has been around since 1993, new excitement and innovation is happening right now. And I haven’t even mentioned Capsicum or Clang! Oh and I can’t forget, I was there for the naming of Groff with all the rowdy laughter and good spirited banter, and it was then that I felt like I was among friends. What are you hoping to bring to the organization and the community through your new leadership role?I hope that my participation in the planning discussions will encourage other business leaders to join in the discussions as well. I also hope to encourage those who use FreeBSD commercially to become more vocal about their experiences and use cases, to encourage others to develop with FreeBSD as well. In doing so, there is a great opportunity to build an endowment among alum to ensure a vibrant future for FreeBSD.How do you see your background and experience complementing the current board? I will be delighted if I am successful in bringing a business lens to the board discussions. I would like to help elevate FreeBSD in the minds of technology companies worldwide and see a broader acceptance of the OS as a commercially desirable alternative.

Thursday, December 11, 2014

In case you have not heard of the Supercomputing.org
conference, it is a meeting of 10,000 researchers,
computer scientists, engineers, students, managers, sales engineers and
three-letter agency representatives that takes place in a different US
city every year. I have hosted a booth at the event since 2009 when it
passed through Portland and this year showcased the bhyve Hypervisor and
explained all things BSD to brilliant attendees from around the world. I
was joined by Patrick Masson, General Manager of the Open Source Initiative,
who helped shed light on the pervasive yet unrecognized use of open
source software by the universities, organizations and companies at the
event. Literally 90% or more of the exhibitors rely on open source but
few give it any recognition. For years, GNU/Linux has dominated the
Top500 list of supercomputers that is announced at the event each year
and I set out to help change that by highlighting bhyve, OpenZFS and
other great technologies in FreeBSD.

SC14 could not have started
on a better note thanks to the announcement on the first day that the
FreeBSD Foundation received a million dollar donation from WhatsApp
founder Jan Koum. I heard many people say "I used FreeBSD ten years ago"
and the news instantly got their attention and set the tone for the
rest of the event. By showcasing ZFS, we drew the attention of ex-Sun
Microsystems engineers and executives and even had a visit by UC
Berkeley CSRG research assistant Clem Cole. The message that "BSD is
back" was loud and clear and I canvased the Student Cluster Competition
to help inspire a new generation of users who had never heard of the
BSDs.

The bhyve booth was in the heart of the ARM pavilion which made for some enlightening conversations. bhyve and the ARM CPU
architecture both stand out for operating without emulation, resulting
in simplicity and performance for bhyve and significant power savings
for ARM. A roadmap exists for bhyve support on ARM and hopefully this
will be something to showcase at SC15. Of the exhibiting ARM partners,
the SoftIron team stood out as loud and proud users of FreeBSD and I
look forward to seeing them at future BSD events.

FreeBSD vendor
iXsystems was also at the event demonstrating FreeNAS and TrueNAS, as
were the SaltStack team who received a bhyve demo and expressed a
sincere desire to include support for bhyve. A handful of other open
source vendors like Red Hat were in attendance plus FreeBSD consumers
like Spectra Logic, EMC/Isilon, NetApp and Juniper. Many individual open
source users came to the booth and my favorite quotation came from a
conversation at a Mellanox event: "Our administrators use FreeNAS at
home and come work and ask 'why the heck aren't we using ZFS?'" Open
source is winning but there is still much work to be done.

Speaking
of work, I asked many people, including Navy researchers moving massive
uncompressed video streams, what FreeBSD needs to do get back on the
Top500 list of supercomputers. The short list of answers I received was:
OFED/OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution support, OpenMPI/Message
Passing Interface support and Lustre distributed file system support.
Surprisingly, NUMA/Non-Uniform Memory Access did not come up.
Interconnect vendor Chelsio Communications stood out as a solid
supporter of FreeBSD and dominant player Mellanox expressed interest in
expanding their support for FreeBSD given the opportunity it represents.
All in all, people were very receptive to giving FreeBSD and other BSDs
a try, especially given that it would be a homecoming for so many
users.

I wish to thank the FreeBSD Foundation for sponsoring the
bhyve booth at SC14 and I am delighted to hear that ARM has just made a
generous $50,000 donation to the Foundation. In total I gave out 250
tri-fold brochures and talked to hundreds of people at SC14. Hopefully
those seeds will take root and we will start seeing FreeBSD systems in the
Student Cluster Competition and on the 2015 Top500 supercomputer list!

Wednesday, December 10, 2014

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to welcome Cheryl R. Blain to the Board of Directors. Cheryl became involved with the FreeBSD community in 2013. She joins the Foundation's board with extensive experience managing software development and building strategic alliances for privately-held, small-cap companies. Cheryl's background includes community outreach, marketing and fundraising efforts with non-profit organizations. We are thrilled to have her as part of the team.One of the responsibilities of our board is to focus on the big picture, by defining our vision, mission, strategic direction, project planning, as well as governing our organization. Our board has decades of experience on working on FreeBSD in design, development, documentation, research, education, and advocacy. We've been strong in providing support in the project development area. As we've grown, we've identified the need to expand our board, and we've identified skills, talents, and experience we want in new board members. Cheryl fills the need for bringing on someone who has a strong business development background. She will help provide a clear direction, strategic planning, and guidance for us to support FreeBSD in the future. In order for us to continue our growth, we need a more stable and consistent funding pool. Cheryl's extensive fundraising background and business connections will help us build and strengthen our business relationships to encourage multi-year donations. She brings with her a passion for FreeBSD and a desire to use her talents to advance the mission of both the Project and the Foundation. Hear more from Cheryl here.Please join us in welcoming her to the board.

The Foundation recently sponsored Michael Dexter to attend MeetBSD, which was held in California in November. Michael provides the following trip report:

This year's MeetBSD California marked a departure from its UnConference roots in favor of a showcase of exciting new developments in the
community. Western Digital kindly hosted the event which made for a
pleasant, professional atmosphere and attendees traveled from as far as
Japan and Eastern Europe to attend.

Of the many talks, the Sony
confirmation that is a long-time BSD user was simply historic and just
may be the result of years of encouragement by AsiaBSDCon attendees.
It's not every day that you confirm the existence of millions of more
BSD users! Yes, "BSD" users at the request of the Sony legal department.
On the same theme, "600M+ Unsuspecting FreeBSD Users" by Rick Reed of
WhatsApp also shed light on the heavy lifting companies are doing with
FreeBSD and finally, Scott Long and Brendan Gregg of Netflix reminded us
how they are pushing 1/3rd of US Internet traffic each evening. Brendan
spoke about performance analysis strategies at both MeetBSD and the
Developer Summit that followed and I dare say is downright giddy about
the performance analysis options available on FreeBSD. In his second
talk he incorporated audience feedback on the spot and I for one am
delighted to see Sun Microsystems refugees like Brendan come to the BSD
community as they each bring a wealth of experience.

Kirk
McKusick's “A Narrative History of BSD” was a delight as always and
reminded us that there is absolutely nothing like BSD: professional and
open source from the start with a mission to bring sanity to government
computing. That mission sounds more like a contemporary meme than 1970's
and '80's funded government initiative! Kirk told us about Bill Joy's
prolific coding and how they navigated the pressure to incorporate the
BB&N network stack into BSD. Kirk also told us the story of how a
delay in grant funding accidentally got him into a lifetime of fast file
system development and how we almost had 48-bit IP addressing. Hearing
both Kirk and Brendan Gregg talk about the frivolity of most benchmarks
decades apart was eye opening!

Finally, David Maxwell's "Pipecut"
talk was a mind-blowing introduction to a pet project of his that
promises to change how we all use the Unix command line. Most of these
talks are online and can be found via meetbsd.com/agenda/.

As
with any BSD event, the hallway track was worth the price of admission
and I had the pleasure of meeting bhyve and FreeNAS developers that I
had only met online. Adrian Chadd tinkered with a Surface Pro system and
eventually got the keyboard working late one night and naturally had
the only working WiFi in the hotel lobby. Glen Barber and I continued
our "the good, the bad and the ugly" talk about distribution mirror
layouts based on his work as FreeBSD release engineer and my work
supporting various OSs on bhyve. Devin Teske provided scripting advice
as always and I cornered people about topics ranging from the status of
virtual networking and a ZFS panic.

Every BSD event has its own
character and MeetBSD is no different. The fact that it takes place in
Silicon Vally allows it to have a great mix of speakers and attendees
who might not make it to international events. Thank you iXsystems for
putting on yet another great MeetBSD!

Monday, December 8, 2014

I spent several days on-site at our east-coast US colocation facility in July 2014 and again in November 2014 racking and installing servers
that the FreeBSD Foundation purchased for the FreeBSD Project.

This hardware is essential for supporting the FreeBSD Project in a number of ways. It provides services for public consumption (FTP mirrors, pkg(8) mirrors, etc.), as well as resources that can be used by FreeBSD developers for various tasks, such as building third-party software packages, release building, and miscellaneous (a.k.a, "testbed") development of services for general use.

More Horsepower to Serve and Support the FreeBSD Community

Since July, fourteen machines were purchased for the east-coast US site, generously hosted by New York Internet in Bridgewater, New Jersey.

The servers were purchased with the end-goal being a complete mirror of the primary site on the west-coast US. The newly-added servers bring the machine count at NYI to sixty-eight total.

Reorganizing for Redundancy

Two of these servers are being used as firewalls, each equipped with four-port Intel(r)
NICs. Both firewalls have direct connections to the switches in all four
cabinets at NYI, providing a redundant uplink to each of the four switches so we can
reboot either firewall without losing connectivity

Restructuring for Additional Services

November's site visit had two primary goals: install and configure the
recent shipment of machines, and reconfigure the network topology behind
the firewalls. Before many of the machines could be brought online, several changes needed to be made to the network.

Each FreeBSD.org site further separates services behind the firewalls using VLANs, limiting each set of services provided within each VLAN to its own network restrictions. In order to properly allocate network space for the new machines, several of the VLANs at NYI needed to be redone.

The most publicly-disruptive part of this was reallocating the VLAN that contains the firewalls. Thanks to Peter Wemm, there were no major service disruptions (aside from a planned simultaneous firewall reboot).

Although not all of these machines have been brought online yet, several of them have been allocated and assigned to the teams that will be using them.

Two machines have been allocated to the FreeBSD Release Engineering Team, one of which was used for the 10.1-RELEASE builds. Four machines have been allocated to the FreeBSD Ports Management Team, which were brought online and handed over just this week.

FreeBSD, Powered by FreeBSD

If you are like me, words about new hardware do not do as much justice as seeing them. Enjoy!

Tuesday, December 2, 2014

I'm writing to you today because I know you are passionate about FreeBSD. You care that it's innovative, secure, stable, reliable, well engineered and documented, and loved.

For 14 years, the FreeBSD Foundation has been providing funding and support for the FreeBSD Project and community worldwide. We are fully funded by donations from people like you. That's why I'm excited to tell you that we've kicked off our year-end fundraising campaign!

This has been an exciting time for the Foundation and FreeBSD community. As you may have heard, we kicked off this fundraiser with the largest donation we've ever received. Whether you are a developer, writer, advocate, organizer, user, or investor, this donation is a positive reflection on the work you are doing for FreeBSD.

Our goal for 2014 is not only to raise substantial funds, but also to grow our community investor pool from our current number of 933 donors to over 2000 donors. Last year we had 1732 community investors. Increasing the number of investors will help ensure a stable and consistent funding stream to support FreeBSD over time. This not only helps keep us a public charity, but it shows the world that we have a strong community supporting FreeBSD.

Your investment in the community provides a wide set of opportunities for people worldwide. Thanks to you, individuals have the chance to learn and gain employable skills, work in areas that follow their interests, and be part of an inclusive and welcoming community. Your support also advances FreeBSD so that it is a perfect research and development platform, working everywhere from academia and start-ups, to Fortune 500 companies.

Speaking of gaining employable skills, I have an inspiring story to share with you from Jan Koum, Co-Founder and CEO of WhatsApp. Jan began using FreeBSD in the late 90s, when he didn't have much money and was living in government housing. He said one of the main reasons he got a job at Yahoo! was because they were using FreeBSD, and his involvement with the Project provided the required skills needed for the job. Years later when he co-founded WhatsApp, he used FreeBSD to keep their servers running. He believes that FreeBSD helped lift him out of poverty. To say thank you and shine a light on the work being done by the Foundation and FreeBSD Project, he recently made a $1,000,000 donation.

The story highlights how working with FreeBSD and its positive community environment can lead to great accomplishments. It shows how with enough support, FreeBSD can continue to offer people incredible opportunities that not only can help move people out of poverty, but also assist more startups and companies in creating something successful.

Sponsoring BSD-related conferences including BSDCan, EuroBSDCon, AsiaBSDCon, NYCBSDCon, MeetBSD, Developer and Vendor Summits, and the Grace Hopper conference to recruit more women to the Project.

Providing travel grants to FreeBSD developers and contributors to the above conferences, to provide face-to-face interaction with other FreeBSD people, to work together to solve problems, implement new designs, and learn from each other.

Increasing our FreeBSD marketing efforts. Efforts include providing more marketing literature to educate people on FreeBSD; recruiting more people to the Project; promoting FreeBSD and The Foundation; helping fundraise; and encouraging more testimonials. This not only includes assisting advocates in the US, but also offering this material in multiple languages to FreeBSD advocates who represent the Project at conferences around the world.

Providing resources and travel grants to help get more FreeBSD representatives to conferences around the world to give presentations on FreeBSD.

Funding more FreeBSD research projects.

This is an exciting time for the Foundation and FreeBSD. We’ve had huge successes this year and are in a tremendous stage of growth. We need your donations now to help us sustain this growth to better support the FreeBSD Project and community.

Monday, November 24, 2014

In this month’s project update we will take a look at the ongoing FreeBSD 64-bit ARM port. AArch64 is the official name for the 64-bit ARM architecture, but it is also known as ARMv8 and arm64. The 64-bit ARM architecture is expected to find use in traditional server markets, in contrast to the embedded and mobile markets where 32-bit ARM is widely adopted.

The FreeBSD Foundation is collaborating with ARM, Cavium, Semihalf and Andrew Turner to port FreeBSD to arm64. Cavium is contributing directly to the Foundation, supplying engineering expertise and hardware for the development community. Cavium's ThunderX platform provides a great match for FreeBSD’s strength as a server operating system, and it supports up to 48 cores in a single package. ThunderX will be the initial reference target for this project, but ports to other arm64 platforms are expected later on.

The kernel bring-up portion of the project is nearing completion; FreeBSD/arm64 boots to single-user mode on ARM's reference simulator. Work is underway on the remaining kernel drivers, and on userland support.

This project’s overall goal is to bring FreeBSD/arm64 to a Tier-1 status, including release media and prebuilt package sets. More information about the arm64 port can be found on the FreeBSD wiki at https://wiki.freebsd.org/arm64, and the in-progress source tree is available through the FreeBSD Foundation’s GitHub account at https://github.com/FreeBSDFoundation/freebsd.

Monday, November 17, 2014

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce it has received a $1,000,000 donation from Jan Koum, CEO and Co-Founder of WhatsApp. This marks the largest single donation to the Foundation since its inception almost 15 years ago, and serves as another example of someone using FreeBSD to great success and then giving back to the community. Find out more about Jan's reasons for donating below.
We're now in the process of working together as a team to decide how best to use this gift to serve the FreeBSD community. That plan will combine financial investment, to ensure the effects of this donation are felt for many years to come, and an acceleration of the Foundation's growth into new capabilities and services.
FreeBSD has a tremendous impact on our world. Our mission is to increase that impact through educational outreach, advocacy, community support, and technical investments. More information on how we serve each of these areas can be found on our website.
With this donation, and the generosity of all those who have donated this year, we have shattered our 2014, million dollar fundraising goal! But this does not mean we can stop our fundraising efforts. Only by increasing the size and diversity of our donor pool can we ensure a stable and consistent funding stream to support the FreeBSD project.

Please help us continue to grow FreeBSD's reach and impact on our world. Donate today!=================================================

Update: The following contains the full text from Jan's Facebook post on 11/17/2014:

Last week, I donated one million dollars to the FreeBSD Foundation, which supports the open source operating system that has helped millions of programmers pursue their passions and bring their ideas to life.

I’m actually one of those people. I started using FreeBSD in the late 90s, when I didn’t have much money and was living in government housing. In a way, FreeBSD helped lift me out of poverty – one of the main reasons I got a job at Yahoo! is because they were using FreeBSD, and it was my operating system of choice. Years later, when Brian and I set out to build WhatsApp, we used FreeBSD to keep our servers running. We still do.

I’m announcing this donation to shine a light on the good work being done by the FreeBSD Foundation, with the hope that others will also help move this project forward. We’ll all benefit if FreeBSD can continue to give people the same opportunity it gave me – if it can lift more immigrant kids out of poverty, and help more startups build something successful, and even transformative.

Friday, November 14, 2014

FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE Announcement

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the
availability of FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE. This is the
second release of the stable/10 branch, which improves
on the stability of FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE and
introduces some new features.

Some of the highlights:

The new console driver, vt(4), has been added.

Support for FreeBSD/i386 guests has been added to
bhyve(4).

The bhyve(4) hypervisor now supports booting from a zfs(8)
filesystem.

Support for SMP was added to the armv6 kernels and
enabled by default in the configuration files for all
platforms that contain multi-core CPUs.

Initial support for UEFI boot has been added for the
FreeBSD/amd64 architecture.

Support has been added to cache geli(8) passphrases during
system boot.

Support for the UDP-Lite protocol (RFC 3828) has been added
to the IPv4 and IPv6 stacks.

The new filesystem automount facility, autofs(5), has been
merged from FreeBSD-CURRENT.

The sshd(8) rc.d(8) startup script now generates ED25519
sshd(8) host keys if keys do not already exist when
ssh_keygen_alg() is invoked.

OpenSSH has been updated to version 6.6p1.

The nc(1) utility has been updated to match the version in
OpenBSD 5.5.

Sendmail has been updated to 8.14.9.

The unbound(8) caching resolver and ldns have been updated
to version 1.4.22.

OpenPAM has been updated to Ourouparia (20140912).

OpenSSL has been updated to version 1.0.1j.

The pkg(8) package management utility has been updated to
version 1.3.8.

For a complete list of new features and known problems, please
see the online release notes and errata list, available at:

Availability

FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE is now available for the amd64,
i386, ia64, powerpc, powerpc64, sparc64, and armv6
architectures.

FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE can be installed from bootable
ISO images or over the network. Some architectures also support
installing from a USB memory stick. The required files can be
downloaded via FTP as described in the section below. While
some of the smaller FTP mirrors may not carry all architectures,
they will all generally contain the more common ones such as
amd64 and i386.

SHA256 and MD5 hashes for the release ISO and memory stick
images are included in the PGP-signed version of this announcement, available at:

Additional UEFI-capable images are available for the amd64
(x86_64) architecture.

The purpose of the images provided as part of the release are
as follows:

dvd1

This contains everything necessary to install the base FreeBSD
operating system, the documentation, and a small set of
pre-built packages aimed at getting a graphical workstation
up and running. It also supports booting into a "livefs"
based rescue mode. This should be all you need if you can
burn and use DVD-sized media.

disc1

This contains the base FreeBSD operating system. It also
supports booting into a "livefs" based rescue mode. There
are no pre-built packages.

bootonly

This supports booting a machine using the CDROM drive but
does not contain the installation distribution sets for
installing FreeBSD from the CD itself. You would need to
perform a network based install (e.g., from an FTP server)
after booting from the CD.

memstick

This can be written to an USB memory stick (flash drive)
and used to do an install on machines capable of booting off
USB drives. It also supports booting into a "livefs" based
rescue mode. There are no pre-built packages.

As one example of how to use the memstick image, assuming
the USB drive appears as /dev/da0 on your machine something
like this should work:

This can be written to an USB memory stick (flash drive)
and used to boot a machine, but does not contain the
installation distribution sets on the medium itself, similar
to the bootonly image. It also supports booting into
a "livefs" based rescue mode. There are no pre-built
packages.

As one example of how to use the mini-memstick image,
assuming the USB drive appears as /dev/da0 on your machine
something like this should work:

Support

Other Projects Based on FreeBSD

There are many "third party" Projects based on
FreeBSD. The Projects range from re-packaging FreeBSD into a more
"novice friendly" distribution to making FreeBSD
available on Amazon's EC2 infrastructure. For more information
about these Third Party Projects see:

Fix a race in pmap_emulate_accessed_dirty() that could trigger a EPT misconfiguration VM-exit.

Important note to ZFS users on the i386 architecture: Using multi-disk ZFS configurations on i386 (mirror, raidz-1, raidz-2, etc.) may causea kernel panic on boot.

Adding 'options KSTACK_PAGES=4' to the kernel configuration is observed to resolve the problem. Please *do* *not* upgrade your system with freebsd-update(8) if using a multi-disk ZFS setup, since this will override the kernel configuration with the GENERIC kernel.

Pre-installed virtual machine images for 10.1-RC4 are also available for amd64 and i386 architectures. The images are located here.

The disk images are available in QCOW2, VHD, VMDK, and raw disk image formats. The image download size is approximately 135 MB, which decompress to a 20GB sparse image.

The partition layout is:

512k - freebsd-boot GPT partition type (bootfs GPT label)

1GB - freebsd-swap GPT partition type (swapfs GPT label)

~17GB - freebsd-ufs GPT partition type (rootfs GPT label)

To install packages from the dvd1.iso installer, create and mount the /dist directory:

# mkdir -p /dist# mount -t cd9660 /dev/cd0 /dist

Next, install pkg(8) from the DVD:

# env REPOS_DIR=/dist/packages/repos pkg bootstrap

At this point, pkg-add(8) can be used to install additional packages from the DVD. Please note, the REPOS_DIR environment variable should be used each time using the DVD as the package repository, otherwise conflicts with packages from the upstream mirrors may occur when they are fetched. For example, to install Gnome and Xorg, run:

During this process, freebsd-update(8) may ask the user to help by merging some configuration files or by confirming that the automaticallyperformed merging was done correctly.

# freebsd-update install

The system must be rebooted with the newly installed kernel before continuing.# shutdown -r now

After rebooting, freebsd-update needs to be run again to install the new userland components:

# freebsd-update install
It is recommended to rebuild and install all applications if possible, especially if upgrading from an earlier FreeBSD release, for example,
FreeBSD 9.x. Alternatively, the user can install misc/compat9x and other compatibility libraries, afterwards the system must be rebooted
into the new userland:

# shutdown -r now

Finally, after rebooting, freebsd-update needs to be run again to remove stale files:

# freebsd-update install

Love FreeBSD? Support this and future releases with a donation to the FreeBSD Foundation!

Wednesday, October 29, 2014

The FreeBSD Foundation sponsored my trip to Sofia, Bulgaria in September 2014, where I attended the FreeBSD DevSummit and EuroBSDcon 2014. I'm a GSoC student and it was my first DevSummit. I would like to thank the FreeBSD Foundation for sponsoring my trip, Gavin Atkinson for an invitation to the DevSummit, Mariusz Zaborski for support during the conference, and the mentor of my project, Devin Teske, for directions.

I arrived in Sofia on Wednesday evening, found my Hill hotel, checked in, and dropped off my luggage. I tried to contact Mariusz, the only person I knew. It was too late for lounging about so I stayed for the rest of the day at the hotel.

The first day of the Developer Summit started with self-presentations and trying to divide participants into smaller groups. It didn’t happen and everybody stayed in the room for one track. It was the first time I could see who is who, because I knew only people’s nicks or names . That day we discussed the future of the 11.0 release, 10/40/100GigE, ports and packages, embedded systems, mainly ARM and MIPS, and tools and support for cross-compilation. That day I met some people: the first was Michał Dubiel from Semihalf. We talked about Network Virtualization, SDN, and OpenContrail. The next person was Daniel Peyrolon, another GSoC student. I showed him my project and he showed me his magic. During lunch break, Mariusz introduced me to Hiroki Sato. We talked about the organization of the conference from the organizers’ side.

The second day of the DevSummit started by dividing groups in two parts. The first track was about developer tools like Phabricator and Jenkins and DNS and DNSSEC on FreeBSD. The second track was about ASLR. I attended the first track. I tried to pass BSDA certificate, so I missed the most important aspects of the DNS session. After lunch break, we had a discussion about crypto algorithms and a documentation session. It was my first DevSummit, so I was only an observer. Next person who Mariusz introduced me to was Gavin Atkinson, but there was no time to talk, just say 'Hi'.

The main conference started on Saturday with Jordan Hubbard's keynote about the past and the future of FreeBSD. I stayed in this track for the next talks. Kris Moore talked about PC-BSD and features based on ZFS, such as snapshots, replication, and encrypted zfs-root with only one pool. Next talk which I attended was about implementation of ZFS. Kirk McKusick made the introduction to internal implementation. After lunch break I joined John-Mark Gurney’s talk about optimizing GELI performance. Results of speed benchmark are amazing. For the rest of the talks, I changed the room and attended Henning Brauer’s talk about OpenBGPD. He talked about the history of the open source implementation of the Border Gateway Protocol. Next, I changed the track the second time and joined Peter Hessler’s talk about routing domains. The last talk was about using QEMU and cross-compilation packages for the ARM architecture. Sean Bruno made a demonstration on how to use those tools. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to attend the amazing Andy Tanenbaum’s talk. After the last speech, I found Gavin and we talked about my GSoC project, the documentation for it, and what I should do in the near future. He offered me his help and introductions to people from the community who could take a look at my code. That day I met Jakub Klama, who is also from Poland. He said 'Hi' in Polish and I was surprised. Jakub was the third FreeBSD GSoC student attending EuroBSDcon 2014. It was sad as I expected to meet more students.

During a social event I met with Eric Allman and Kirk McKusick. Of course, Mariusz was the middleman. Eric told us a lot of stories from his life, about the first steps of networking and transatlantic communication. He drew attention to students’ bad practices on memory management and how important it is. I talked with Kirk about my project and how GSoC looks from the organizational side.

The second day of EuroBSDcon was less busy for the people after the social event. I started with Baptiste Daroussin’s talk about cross building. I attended the LibreSSL and ASLR talks. Very interesting for me was the talk about OpenContrail and OpenStack for FreeBSD. Michał Dubiel described software architecture and support for OpenContrail and OpenStack in the FreeBSD world. The most interesting talk was about securing sensitive data at the
University of Oslo. Dag-Erling Smøgrav described the system they use. The keynote was very interesting too. Atanas Chobanov showed us how to use SecureDrop, Tails, and Tor for anonymously submitting documents. During the closing session, Deb Goodkin presented about the FreeBSD Foundation, and Shteryana Shopova and Paul Schenkeveld presented about the EuroBSD Foundation. After the closing session, we organized an unofficial social event.

I think that attending conferences is a huge motivation for work for new people. It was a great opportunity to meet people I had known only from the Internet. I hope I will be able to participate in DevSummits and BSD conferences again in the future.

Friday, October 24, 2014

The FreeBSD Foundation has been a long-time sponsor of events like the upcoming FreeBSD Developer and Vendor Summit. This year we would also like to thank Microsoft and RootBSD for their extended support of the event. Opportunities to bring the developer and vendor communities together to further the Project would not be possible without the support of companies like these two. Please take a minute and find out more about why these organizations are involved with the FreeBSD Project.

Microsoft's customers have been clear that they want a single hypervisor for their environments, whether they are running Windows, Linux or FreeBSD operating systems. Microsoft is committed to working with the FreeBSD Foundation to ensure that FreeBSD is a first-class guest operating system on Windows Server Hyper-V and is focused on improving reliability, performance and support of new Hyper-V features in our upcoming updated release of BSD Integration Services. Find out more here.

RootBSD is a provider of hosting services with an emphasis on the BSD family of operating systems. As users of FreeBSD ourselves, we believe it is important to contribute back to the community and do so by sponsoring services for individual developers as well as events such as the Developer's Summit. We are thrilled to be able to support the Silicon Valley Developer's Summit, as we've seen first hand the results that face-to-face meetings can have in sparking new ideas and discussions that might not happen through strictly online communication. Find out more about RootBSD here.

The vt(4) driver has been updated to save and restore keyboard mode and LED states when switching windows.

Several fixes to the SCTP protocol implementation.

A potential race condition in obtaining a file pointer has been corrected.

Fix ZFS ZVOL deadlock and rename issues.

Restore libopie.so ABI compatibility with 10.0-RELEASE.

Removed the last vestige of MD5 password hashes.

Several rc(8) script updates and fixes.

bsdinstall(8) has been updated to allow selecting local_unbound in the default services to enable at first boot.

Prevent ZFS leaking pool free space.

Fix rtsold(8) remote buffer overflow vulnerability. [SA-14:20]

Fix routed(8) remote denial of service vulnerability. [SA-14:21]

Fix memory leak in sandboxed namei lookup. [SA-14:22]

OpenSSL has been updated to version 1.0.1j. [SA-14:23]

Fix an issue where a FreeBSD virtual machine provisioned in the Microsoft Azure service does not recognize the second attached disk on the system.

Pre-installed virtual machine images for 10.1-RC3 are also available for amd64 and i386 architectures. The images are located here.

The disk images are available in QCOW2, VHD, VMDK, and raw disk image formats. The image download size is approximately 135 MB, which decompress to a 20GB sparse image.

The partition layout is:

512k - freebsd-boot GPT partition type (bootfs GPT label)

1GB - freebsd-swap GPT partition type (swapfs GPT label)

~17GB - freebsd-ufs GPT partition type (rootfs GPT label)

To install packages from the dvd1.iso installer, create and mount the /dist directory:

# mkdir -p /dist# mount -t cd9660 /dev/cd0 /dist

Next, install pkg(8) from the DVD:

# env REPOS_DIR=/dist/packages/repos pkg bootstrap

At this point, pkg-add(8) can be used to install additional packages from the DVD. Please note, the REPOS_DIR environment variable should be used each time using the DVD as the package repository, otherwise conflicts with packages from the upstream mirrors may occur when they are fetched. For example, to install Gnome and Xorg, run:

During this process, freebsd-update(8) may ask the user to help by merging some configuration files or by confirming that the automaticallyperformed merging was done correctly.

# freebsd-update install

The system must be rebooted with the newly installed kernel before continuing.# shutdown -r now

After rebooting, freebsd-update needs to be run again to install the new userland components:

# freebsd-update install
It is recommended to rebuild and install all applications if possible, especially if upgrading from an earlier FreeBSD release, for example,
FreeBSD 8.x. Alternatively, the user can install misc/compat9x and other compatibility libraries, afterwards the system must be rebooted
into the new userland:

# shutdown -r now

Finally, after rebooting, freebsd-update needs to be run again to remove stale files:

# freebsd-update install

Love FreeBSD? Support this and future releases with a donation to the FreeBSD Foundation!

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

We were thrilled to be a Gold Sponsor and to attend EuroBSDCon 2014 held in Sofia, Bulgaria September 27-28. We were also a sponsor of the developer summit. The conference was well attended, with over 225 people there.

Students working together on a project

Not only did we sponsor four FreeBSD contributors to attend the conference, but with help from Google providing women computer scientists scholarships, I saw more women attending this conference than I had ever seen before.

I attend these events to touch base with the FreeBSD user and developer community. It’s a chance for

me to find out what people are working on, what kind of help they could use from the Foundation, feedback on what we can be doing to support the FreeBSD Project and community, and what features/functions people want supported in FreeBSD. In addition, the other Foundation members, who are active developers, writers, and teachers in the FreeBSD world, attend, not only to connect with the community, but also go to sessions to get a more in-depth understanding of new features and functions, as well as learn what others are working on.

During the event, we held our fall fundraising campaign and raised over $2,000 in donations! One lucky donor won a copy of the newly released Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System (2nd Edition). Thank you to everyone who donated.

It really was a great opportunity to meet FreeBSD contributors from around the world. Attendees were mostly from Europe, including Spain, Belgium, Switzerland, France, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Russia, and Germany. There were also people from Japan, Canada, and the US. Every time I attend one of these BSD-related conferences, I’m blown away by the excitement and passion these people have and share. I’m full of admiration as I watch these dedicated people interact with each other, sharing information on their projects, helping each other with their work, and inspiring new people to get involved. I love watching the newbies interact with the more seasoned FreeBSD contributors (Rockstars!), as the latter instills a sense a pride, curiosity, and engagement in FreeBSD. It’s a chance for people to work face-to-face, get inspired, and learn about areas to get involved with. So much work gets accomplished at these conferences.

Kirk about to give a presentation

We had 7 Foundation board and staff members attend the conference. Kirk McKusick gave a two day tutorial on the FreeBSD Kernel Internals based on the newly released 2nd edition of The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System. He also gave a talk on the implementation of ZFS in FreeBSD. Erwin Lansing chaired the DNS and Ports sessions of the developer summit, while Ed Maste gave a presentation on the current state of the LLDB debugger in FreeBSD. On the FreeBSD Journal front, George Neville-Neil was able to recruit more material.

The Foundation also held a board meeting which focused on advocacy in Europe and how to approach more European companies to help facilitate collaboration with the Project, as well as seeking more donations from that part of the world. We held many discussions with FreeBSD developers on current and future projects, increasing efforts for greater collaboration on graphics stack maintenance and a variety of technical topics.

Working the FreeBSD Foundation table

Overall, it was another successful conference and we are looking forward to participating in next year’s European conference in Stockholm, Sweden.

Monday, October 20, 2014

The FreeBSD Foundation was a gold sponsor of EuroBSDCon 2014, which was held in Sofia, Bulgaria in September. The Foundation also sponsored Bjoern Heidotting to attend the conference, who provides the following trip report:

Since I'm fairly new to the FreeBSD community I would like to introduce myself first. My name is Bjoern Heidotting, I live in Germany, I work as a system administrator and I'm a FreeBSD user since 2006 and a contributor since 2012. I mostly contribute patches for the German documentation in the doc-tree. Why do I contribute? Well, the short version is that I simply wanted to give something back to FreeBSD and the community.

Thanks to Benedict Reuschling, who invited me, and the FreeBSD Foundation, I was able to attend the DevSummit and the conference at EuroBSDCon 2014 in Sofia.

I arrived at Sofia airport on Wednesday and I took a taxi to get to my hotel the Best Western Expo, directly located at the IEC where the conference was held. However, the taxidriver decided to take me on a sightseeing tour through the city of Sofia. But after 1,5 hours I finally arrived at the hotel. The actual time to get from the airport to my hotel is about 10 minutes. Fortunately taxis are cheap in Bulgaria compared to Germany. And the city is really, really worth seeing.

Later that day, I met Daniel Peyrolon, a GSoC student with whom I shared a room. We decided to take dinner together and started getting to know each other. Afterwards, we socialized with some other FreeBSD people at the hotel bar.

On Thursday the DevSummit started with every attendee and developer introducing himself. Then some interesting topics and roadmaps were discussed for the upcoming 11.0 release, as well as other topics such as ASLR, UEFI, 10G Ethernet, just to name a few. It was a very interesting brainstorming with valuable input from all attendees. Since it was my first time at a DevSummit, I was impressed to see how fast these people can fill a bunch of foils with topics and ideas. Awesome!

After lunch a small group, including me, sat together in another room where I started to work on several patches for the Handbook. In the evening we had dinner at Lebed Restaurant. A very nice location. This is where I first met Deb Goodkin from the Foundation. She was the one I talked to prior to the conference and she brought Daniel and me together. Thank you Deb. It was very nice meeting her.

On Friday I mostly worked on a big patch for the network-servers section in the Handbook. I also met Beat Gaetzi while catching fresh air outside and we talked about our roles in the Project and what we do. After lunch the documentation topic started, which I was very interested in. We talked about issues on the website, Handbook sections, etc. The details of the session can be found on the wiki.

In the evening we had dinner at "The Windmill" and I met Henning Brauer from the OpenBSD project. It was really fun talking to him. Man, this guy can tell crazy stories.

Saturday and Sunday were conference days with one interesting talk chasing the next. All the talks were great, altough I had some favorites, including "Snapshots, Replication, and Boot-Environments" by Kris Moore, "Introducing ASLR in FreeBSD" by Shawn Webb, and "Securing sensitive & restricted data" by Dag-Erling Smorgrav. One of the highlights for me was the social event in Hotel Balkan on Saturday. Again, meeting the people behind the email addresses and talking to them was a great experience.

A big thanks goes out to Shteryana Shopova and her crew for organizing this great event.

Fix XHCI driver for devices which have more than 15 physical root HUB ports.

Fix old iSCSI initiator to work with new CAM locking.

Fix page length reported for Block Limits VPD page.

Add QCOW v1 & v2 support to mkimg(1).

Pre-installed virtual machine images for 10.1-RC2 are also available for amd64 and i386 architectures. The images are located here.

The disk images are available in QCOW2, VHD, VMDK, and raw disk image formats. The image download size is approximately 135 MB, which decompress to a 20GB sparse image.

The partition layout is:

512k - freebsd-boot GPT partition type (bootfs GPT label)

1GB - freebsd-swap GPT partition type (swapfs GPT label)

~17GB - freebsd-ufs GPT partition type (rootfs GPT label)

To install packages from the dvd1.iso installer, create and mount the /dist directory:

# mkdir -p /dist# mount -t cd9660 /dev/cd0 /dist

Next, install pkg(8) from the DVD:

# env REPOS_DIR=/dist/packages/repos pkg bootstrap

At this point, pkg-add(8) can be used to install additional packages from the DVD. Please note, the REPOS_DIR environment variable should be used each time using the DVD as the package repository, otherwise conflicts with packages from the upstream mirrors may occur when they are fetched. For example, to install Gnome and Xorg, run:

During this process, freebsd-update(8) may ask the user to help by merging some configuration files or by confirming that the automaticallyperformed merging was done correctly.

# freebsd-update install

The system must be rebooted with the newly installed kernel before continuing.# shutdown -r now

After rebooting, freebsd-update needs to be run again to install the new userland components:

# freebsd-update install
It is recommended to rebuild and install all applications if possible, especially if upgrading from an earlier FreeBSD release, for example,
FreeBSD 8.x. Alternatively, the user can install misc/compat9x and other compatibility libraries, afterwards the system must be rebooted
into the new userland:

# shutdown -r now

Finally, after rebooting, freebsd-update needs to be run again to remove stale files:

# freebsd-update install

Love FreeBSD? Support this and future releases with a donation to the FreeBSD Foundation!

A bug that would cause all processes to appear to have the parent PID of '1' has been fixed.

Various updates to bsdinstall(8) and bsdconfig(8).

The Hyper-V KVP (key-value pair) driver has been added, and enabled by default on amd64 and i386 architectures.

Pre-installed virtual machine images for 10.1-RC1 are also available for amd64 and i386 architectures. The images are located here.

The disk images are available in QCOW2, VHD, VMDK, and raw disk image formats. The image download size is approximately 135 MB, which decompress to a 20GB sparse image.

The partition layout is:

512k - freebsd-boot GPT partition type (bootfs GPT label)

1GB - freebsd-swap GPT partition type (swapfs GPT label)

~17GB - freebsd-ufs GPT partition type (rootfs GPT label)

To install packages from the dvd1.iso installer, create and mount the /dist directory:

# mkdir -p /dist# mount -t cd9660 /dev/cd0 /dist

Next, install pkg(8) from the DVD:

# env REPOS_DIR=/dist/packages/repos pkg bootstrap

At this point, pkg-add(8) can be used to install additional packages from the DVD. Please note, the REPOS_DIR environment variable should be used each time using the DVD as the package repository, otherwise conflicts with packages from the upstream mirrors may occur when they are fetched. For example, to install Gnome and Xorg, run:

During this process, freebsd-update(8) may ask the user to help by merging some configuration files or by confirming that the automaticallyperformed merging was done correctly.

# freebsd-update install

The system must be rebooted with the newly installed kernel before continuing.# shutdown -r now

After rebooting, freebsd-update needs to be run again to install the new userland components:

# freebsd-update install
It is recommended to rebuild and install all applications if possible, especially if upgrading from an earlier FreeBSD release, for example,
FreeBSD 8.x. Alternatively, the user can install misc/compat9x and other compatibility libraries, afterwards the system must be rebooted
into the new userland:

# shutdown -r now

Finally, after rebooting, freebsd-update needs to be run again to remove stale files:

# freebsd-update install

Love FreeBSD? Support this and future releases with a donation to the FreeBSD Foundation!

Friday, October 3, 2014

The FreeBSD Foundation is excited to be participating in the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference to be held in Phoenix, AZ on October 8-10. As many of you know, Rear Admiral Grace Hopper was a pioneer in computing, inventor of the first compiler, and the first person to record a (literal) bug. This year's annual conference in her honor has a full registration of 8,000 women computing technologists from all over the world.

The Foundation is a Silver non-profit sponsor for this event and will have a booth in the Expo area. In addition to informational brochures and Foundation pens, we'll be giving away some stickers created for this event. The stickers say "I choose FreeBSD because I know my ability to create the future has nothing to do with my gender and everything to do with my skills".

As part of this year's Grace Hopper Open Source Day on October 8, Dru Lavigne will be presenting "An Introduction to FreeBSD" at 14:00 in rooms South 164-166.

Shteryana Shopova will be hosting a lunchtime table topic on FreeBSD at table #12 on October 9 from 12:45 to 15:30.

Registration has closed for this event as it has reached its maximum capacity. However, if you know a woman technologist who is attending, let her know about the FreeBSD booth, presentation, and lunchtime table topic.

Wednesday, October 1, 2014

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce a collaboration with Cavium Inc. to develop and deliver the first ARMv8 reference design and implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System based on the ThunderX™ workload optimized processor family. Find out more at here.

If you notice problems you can report them through the Bugzilla PR system or on the -stable mailing list.

If you would like to use SVN to do a source based update of an existing system, use the "stable/10" branch.

A list of changes since 10.0-RELEASE are available on the stable/10 release notes page.

Changes between 10.1-BETA2 and 10.1-BETA3 include:

Support for serial and null console has been added to the UEFI boot loader.

A potential panic triggered by referencing a device that has been renamed has been fixed in the cam(4) subsystem.

OpenPAM has been updated to the Ourouparia (20140912) release.

New sysctls have been added to vt(4) to enable or disable potentially dangerous key combinations (such as reboot, halt, and break to debugger).

The mkimg(1) utility has been updated to allow creating empty partition entries.

The GEOM_ELI class will now cache passphrases for disk decryption, which allows the system to boot after the first passphrase entry if the remaining disks on the system use the same passphrase.

Support for controlling mfi(4) controller properties has been added to mfiutil(8).

The /usr/lib32/compat shared library directory has been added to the default ld-elf32.so.1 path.

Use of "no" for a Norwegian keymap file is now permitted in rc.conf(5).

Several bug fixes to autofs(5) have been implemented.

Pre-installed virtual machine images for 10.1-BETA3 are also available for amd64 and i386 architectures. The images are located here.

The disk images are available in QCOW2, VHD, VMDK, and raw disk image formats. The image download size is approximately 135 MB, which decompress to a 20GB sparse image.

The partition layout is:

512k - freebsd-boot GPT partition type (bootfs GPT label)

1GB - freebsd-swap GPT partition type (swapfs GPT label)

~17GB - freebsd-ufs GPT partition type (rootfs GPT label)

To install packages from the dvd1.iso installer, create and mount the /dist directory:

# mkdir -p /dist# mount -t cd9660 /dev/cd0 /dist

Next, install pkg(8) from the DVD:

# env REPOS_DIR=/dist/packages/repos pkg bootstrap

At this point, pkg-add(8) can be used to install additional packages from the DVD. Please note, the REPOS_DIR environment variable should be used each time using the DVD as the package repository, otherwise conflicts with packages from the upstream mirrors may occur when they are fetched. For example, to install Gnome and Xorg, run:

During this process, freebsd-update(8) may ask the user to help by merging some configuration files or by confirming that the automaticallyperformed merging was done correctly.

# freebsd-update install

The system must be rebooted with the newly installed kernel before continuing.# shutdown -r now

After rebooting, freebsd-update needs to be run again to install the new userland components:

# freebsd-update install
It is recommended to rebuild and install all applications if possible, especially if upgrading from an earlier FreeBSD release, for example,
FreeBSD 8.x. Alternatively, the user can install misc/compat9x and other compatibility libraries, afterwards the system must be rebooted
into the new userland:

# shutdown -r now

Finally, after rebooting, freebsd-update needs to be run again to remove stale files:

# freebsd-update install

Love FreeBSD? Support this and future releases with a donation to the FreeBSD Foundation!